At the lowest point of the run, where the curve flung skiers upward again, the surface was hardest to predict or even to analyze by sight. Hugh had had the area lighted as well as possible, but no lighting would let human eyes determine how well the deposit was packed at any given moment. This was where the sport grew interesting…

Janice kept her feet. She was traveling last enough now to guarantee serious damage to her armor if she hit anything solid, explosive or not, and she was crouched to give the wind as little handle as possible.

For a brief moment she felt almost normal weight as she reached the bottom arc and caromed upward. Then she was off the snow beyond the first lighted area, with a fifty-meter gulf below her, and orbiting more or less toward a second and larger hill which started two hundred meters away. The target area was also well lighted, but for these few seconds she herself must be nearly invisible to Hugh. She had no idea of how, or how well, the Samian could perceive her.

She was busy with her poles, which looked more like broad-bladed oars; a skier’s problem of staying upright either on or off the ground, in Habranha’s feeble gravity and dense air, was much worse than on any Erthumoi-normal world. Strong wrists meant quite as much as good ankles in this kind of “jumping.” She made a technically poor but not catastrophic landing on her right ski, which she had managed to keep aligned with her direction of flight, brought the other down, slowed aerodynamically for a few seconds with her poles held across her body, and finally felt sure enough of her traction to bring herself to a stop in normal ski fashion. “All right. Who’s next?”

She didn’t ask vocally. Her armor and body cavities were filled with diving fluid, since her job of-ten took her to the bottom of the Pits. Vocal cords evolved for gas don’t work in liquid, and her armor carried a code transmitter whose output, while far more sophisticated than the short-and-long combinations of the original Erthumoi telegraph, was still much slower and clumsier than ordinary speech. It was loud enough to be heard for several hundred meters if the wind were not too strong.